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Five years ago, Rochester's Midtown complex was a mostly empty collection of moldering buildings plopped in the middle of downtown, and a plan: knock them down to make way for PAETEC Holding Corp.'s new headquarters, with plenty of land left over for other developers.

On Wednesday, the head of the Arkansas company that bought PAETEC last year stood in an expanse of dirt and gravel in the Midtown site and looked up to where the Windstream Corp. logo will go on the exterior of the building being finished there.

"It looks very good, very nice," CEO Jeff Gardner said as Pike Co. officials took him on a ...